Rex Murphy: Sorry Erin O'Toole, the Liberals cannot be outbid on climate change
Mar 23, 2021
Supporters take their seats during the opening night of the federal Conservative leadership convention in Toronto on Friday, May 26, 2017. PHOTO BY NATHAN DENETTE /THE CANADIAN PRESS
“We believe in climate change. Greta Thunberg approved this message.”
— Conservative ad, next election.
If, purely as speculative analogy, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole were leading the Israelites of old, right now they’d be heading back to Egypt. And likely there’d be a tax on manna.
The overwhelming ideological obsession of the Trudeau Liberals is “climate change.” It is a political signifier, a blazing red underline that the “believer” holds a passionate, never-to-be-challenged conviction the world is doomed because it has reached industrial status.
It holds as an absolute law that oil and gas must be shut down, economies must be slowed or stilled, and statutory regulation to strangle the industrial base of the world’s modern economies is not only justified, but absolutely, as soon as possible, necessary. The true believer holds that the planet’s climate has only to turn that carbon emission dial and the world is saved. The true believer is also, not accidentally, anti-modernist, anti-capitalist, not too fond of humans and fixated on this topic to the exclusion of every other consideration.
Is that the “climate change” O’Toole is on board with? That he would make a shibboleth for all true conservatives?
For a Canadian political leader to insist “climate change is real” is not simply a statement on climate science. It actually translates into a series of aligned beliefs. It means he believes Canada must bow to this crusade, that our pittance of the dread emissions are a trigger for world calamity, that we must impose taxes and more taxes on every aspect of industry and that simultaneously we must start importing windmills and solar panels to replace all our major power sources.
Supreme Court's carbon tax decision will set election terms for Trudeau and O'TooleIt also means he is dead against nuclear power, which has no emissions at all, will oppose hydro dams, the next cleanest and, most of all, he believes that the Western provinces’ oil and gas industries are a scourge from the pit of hell and he will therefore belittle them, protest them and fight them — and if ever given power, wipe them out utterly.
The crusade against Alberta has hurt Canada. And it will hurt Canada even more as soon — such is the hope — as we emerge from the shutdown and the economic savaging of COVID-19. Because the next ploy will be to manipulate the medical emergency into the climate emergency.
Watch as the “climate change agenda” slyly moves in as the Liberal’s number 1 obsessional priority, the very creed of the Liberal party and government.
So why does the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada hold its great convention and put a “faith-test” on climate change at its heart? Why did O’Toole drag out the ugly slander of “denier” for those who contest its supremacy over all other issues, its many dubious methodologies, questionable modelling and failed predictions? (Just because “denier” has become press-shorthand doesn’t cleanse it of its spiteful meanness and vicious attempt to associate asking questions about global warming with Holocaust denial.)
Where was the speech ripping U.S. President Joe Biden for his fiat on Keystone XL? Where was the call for an east-west pipeline? Where was the volcanic anger over Alberta’s resources being land-locked, the various jihads against any pipelines, anywhere?
There was so much wrong with the Conservative resolution on climate change, which was ultimately voted down by the members. Did it not enter the heads of those who advise the Conservative leader that the Liberal party of Justin Trudeau, Catherine McKenna and their one-time climate-warrior mentor, Gerald Butts, cannot be politically outbid on global warming? Did they not think that instead of lining up with the Liberals on this crusade of folly, the Conservatives should be challenging their opponents’ fanatical willingness to subordinate the Canadian economy to their obsession on the subject?
Has O’Toole looked at his caucus? They aren’t all from Saanich, B.C.
National Post
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